I’ve seen in the UDN documentation and on a couple of forums that seems to be saying that an animtree can work with different skeletons. Has anyone ever come across this before? Does it have anything to do with bone to track mapping?
Maybe it just means that , that in fact it is true that a character with a diferent skeleton can have same anim treee not like in ue4… Which every character has a different anim tree.
@Neongho Thanks for the response. In my post I said animtree and I should have said animset. Here is the portion from UDN Animation System Overview that I’m referring to:
Bone To Track Mapping
Tracks in the AnimSet are related to bones in the skeletal mesh by name. This is because you may want to play the same animation set on different skeletal meshes which do not have exactly the same number or order of bones. For quick lookup the AnimSet caches a set of AnimSetMeshLinkup structures. These are a mapping table between the bones of a particular skeletal mesh and the tracks of the AnimSet.
I saw a forum post (UE4) on how to do this, like you could in UDK. Any ideas?
For what I know, each animation tree is specific to the skeleton, you can’t use the same animation tree for different skeletons. You can yes retarget animations on the animation set. I never tried to this in UDK, but I doubt the UDK Animation Retarget is better than MotionBuilder, or Maya Animation Retarget, as they use the same animation engine HumanIK.
I do this a lot for my game, because I have thousands of MOCAP animations from different sources (different skeletons).
The way I do was to use the 3dsmax UT3 Male Biped template provided by EPIC Games. I exported that Biped to MotionBuilder, made the Inverse Kinematics Rigging in MotionBuilder, then I just import these mocaps to motionbuilder and retarget them the UT3 Biped (everything inside motionbuilder), then I save the UT3 Biped animation, import back to 3dsmax, and from 3dsmax I export the final animation, because the UT3 Skeleton is constrained to the Biped, so you dont animate the skeleton, you animate the 3dsmax biped. Thats the reason why I export this biped to motion builder and animate it there.
Even if you can’t afford MotionBuilder, you can buy Maya indie version https://makeanything.autodesk.com/maya-indie
The animation system is the same as motion builder, the Autodesk HumanIK.
Trust me, retargetting animations in Maya/MotionBuilder is very easy and fast.
Thank you for taking the time to help me with this. I’ve looked at quite a number of youtube tutorials on retargeting with Maya and they don’t look all that straightforward. If you have a link to one that looks professional, I’d love to see it. Using Maya this way, can you batch retarget animations, or does it have to be one animation at a time.
Are you familiar with what the process would be to retarget an animset? I haven’t found anything except what I’ve posted above. With covid wreaking havoc, even the Maya indie version is out of reach (thanks for pointing it out, though, I wasn’t aware that it existed).
Hey,try this Unreal X-Editor - UDK Programming and UnrealScript - Unreal Engine Forums
and tell me how that worked,bye.
@Archoneater That is a seriously cool and professional looking piece of software, and it is now my default UScript editor :). I don’t see the connection, however, between the script editor/wizard and animset retargeting. Am I missing something, or did I just misunderstand? Either way, it’s a beautiful editor and I will continue using it.
Cool!
there are still some great tools outthere…i haven´t the time to dive into but from seeing so far,it´s a great shortcut to import character without binding them to existing udk skels. in the classic way.
it also comes with weapons,vehicles,characters and more!
please tell me how that worked for you,bye.